ALONE IN LAOS

     I was alone in southern Laos. Manyon had crossed the Mekong to Thailand; I was headed back to Phnom Penh for a flight to Saigon and another to the States. Fall semester would be starting soon.

     I'd come to an unmarked crossroads and taken the wrong fork. I was lost. All I saw was a narrow road and two walls of jungle that nearly closed out the sky above it. No humans, no peasant huts, not even a blown bridge or an abandoned guard shack. I walked the road. Finally a large building of weathered boards came into view. I stepped onto its high porch, halloed. No answer. The building was open, but no one was around. It seemed there hadn't been anyone around for a long time, though it was clean and in good repair. There was no hint of what the building had been used for. Maybe meetings, maybe classes... I couldn’t tell.

     Looking through an open window, I saw the only evidence, besides the building itself, of human presence: a life-size, nicely framed, official portrait of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

from the chapter ALMOST A COWBOY

     After a field was mowed, the freshcut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelvefoot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twentyyear lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two and a half foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again. 

     Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done.